Order Up!

Overview

There have been a few casual culinary based games on the Wii such as Diner Dash and Cooking Mama, and both were pretty successful games. So now Zoo Games has seen these games and has come up with Order Up! a fun cooking game that wants to leave that lasting appeal Wii fans have been looking for. The entirety of the game is based on motion sensitivity and looks to use the Wii controls to its advantage. Can Order Up! bring us a fun simple cooking game, or will it leave us wanting someone else to cook the food for a while?

Gameplay

To start it off the game puts you straight in a bit of a tutorial just to get players used to the controls and layout of the kitchen. The character teaching you is downright annoying but right from the start the game is a lot of fun even when your being taught. Everything is motion sensitive and at first I was a little weary, but the controls seem to work really well with the game.

The thing I liked about Order Up! was that with such a simple game there was a little story behind it. You start off by picking either a male or female chef and see a now hiring sign up on a small burger joint. Right after the tutorial you find you can open your own restaurant and the game goes on from there. You will find that the more you impress food critics the better and nicer your restaurant will become.

Lets talk about the gameplay which to my surprise turned out to make a pretty fun game. You are in the first person point of view where you simply aim the remote to what item you want to work with first. You have a checklist of what items need to go into each full meal. You will find that over a period of time you will memorize how to to quickly create certain meals in which guests seem to choose the most often. When creating these meals you do a variety of gestures such as dicing, peeling and the ever exciting flipping of a burger. The game is all about how fast and accurately you can prepare a meal and you will even have food critics coming in and judging your abilities.

The controls as mentioned earlier work really well with the game and as most Wii games will do make you look ridiculous to spectators watching you play. The best part is how in detail some of the meals can become and how much work needs to go into them. Of course there are simple items that you create, but sometimes you will need to do more then one meal at once. This is where the intensity comes in and the great feeling of seeing your guest enjoying their meal. I won’t lie to you there were a few times where I literally began sweating during a huge order in which I knew I didn’t have much time to complete. That is what really keeps the game going, but after a few long days of play the game becomes really repetitive and unfortunately holds Order Up! from being the great game it could be.

Graphics

The one thing I am always worried about with Wii games are the graphics as a lot of the simple type games like Order Up! really failed to impress me graphically. However when looking at Order Up! you will notice a few strong areas as well. All of the food items are really clear and bright and the whole game has a nice fluidity to it. Don’t get me wrong these aren’t up to Metroid Prime or other big games on the Wii, but for the simple fun game it is the graphics do enough to make it look like some work was put into them.

Fun Factor

I have found in many Wii titles that they are always really fun games but cannot withstand the tests of time maybe even a week of play or so. This is no different with Order Up! as it starts off as a really exciting compelling game, but ends up being very repetitive after a long days play. I had the most fun with a spectator watching as the game gets more intense when someone is yelling at you to hurry up. This is an extremely fun game for the first few sessions, but fails to keep it fun and makes it end up like your actually working while playing the game.

Overall

Order Up! had a lot of the key ingredients that you would want to find in a simple game like it is. It has a really great control scheme that works well with the objectives in the game, pretty solid graphics that make it easy to look at, and can be extremely fun to play at times. However with all this being said it would have been nice to add some side objectives or even put in some more menu items so the game didn’t become so repetitive. If you have a Wii and are looking for a simple fun game to keep you entertained go out and rent Order Up! but for someone looking to buy this one won’t keep you busy for long.

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